After Posing for Selfie in 2013, Pope Francis Posts #ThrowbackThursday Pix on Instagram

Pope Francis holds a gift from children during his pastoral visit at the Saint Tommaso parish in the outskirts of Rome February 16, 2014. REUTERS/Remo Casilli
Reuters

Guess who just used a #ThrowbackThursday hashtag on Instagram?

It's not Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus or one of the Kardhasian sisters. It's Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now more known as Pope Francis.

After having a selfie picture taken in 2013 with young pilgrims, the pontiff gave Catholics as well as netizens an idea how handsome he was during his younger days through two #ThrowbackThursday sepia photos on Instagram.

This latest posting by Pope Francis, who celebrated on March 13 his first year anniversary as leader of the 1.2-billion strong Roman Catholic Church, is proof of how tech savvy the pope is despite his age.

Besides his Instagram account, the pontiff is also on Twitter using the handle @Pontifex, which he actually inherited from his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. However, while the pope emeritus signed off that Twitter account on Feb 28, 2013, with less than 3 million followers, the charismatic and lovable Pope Francis has added a few million more that current Twitter English account followers is at 3.82 million, while including the other languages, his Twitter followers reached 10 million by the end of October 2013.

In a span of 12 months, he had posted 287 tweets on that account, the latest of which is on Friday. He wrote, "May we learn to say 'thank you' to God and to one another. We teach children to do it, and then we forget to do it ourselves."

Because of his influence using Twitter, Burson-Marsyeller, a Switzerland-based public relations and communications firms, named him in July 2013 as the most influential world leader on the popular microblogging site.

The pope, with his English-language tweets being retweeted an average of 8,219 times, beat U.S. President Barack Obama who has more Twitter followers at 39 million, but whose tweets are reposted only by an average of 2,309 times.